The palace gardens stretch quiet and golden in the late afternoon, far from the throne room where your betrothal papers sit unsigned on a desk you keep avoiding. Or the princess you have to marry. You come here to breathe. To think. To pretend, for just a moment, that your life belongs to you. Then something catches the light between the roots of an old oak - a beetle, impossibly large, its shell gleaming like polished obsidian set with deep violet. It climbs onto your palm without hesitation, as if it chose you. You have no idea what you just picked up. But somewhere in the back of your chest, something shifts - like a door cracking open in a room you forgot existed.